I agree that programming as a career sucks a lot more than it used to. I understand that part of my saying so is the result of changes in me or my own circumstances. Life was better when I didn't have to deal so much with product and project managers, when I didn't have to be the "leader" creating momentum and mentoring those who don't want to be mentored. I do miss the days when I was an individual contributor minding my own business.
On the other hand, that doesn't explain everything. As the computing industry has become bigger and more lucrative, it has also become less like a gentleman's race and more like a cage fight. The primary mode of interaction has shifted from collaboration to competition. There are always more projects in any given space, creating more factions each more determined to sling FUD at each other so that their project and their investment in it stay relevant. There are more sub-sub-domains of knowledge, with those on the peaks of each sneering at the others. The environment for women has become measurably worse than it used to be; I worked with a higher percentage of women on Encore's kernel team twenty years ago than I do now even at Red Hat. It's a nasty, aggression-soaked environment, and anybody who doesn't believe that must not have read the other comments on this very page. I can tell you, it didn't used to be that way.
Programming as an activity has its ups and downs. Programming as a career has started to just plain suck.
> become less like a gentleman's race and more like a cage fight. The primary mode of interaction has shifted from collaboration to competition.
Man does this resonate...for the last several years now I have recurring encounters of people in programming having no interest in doing or discovering what's Right, but rather only concerned about Winning petty arguments, pushing their agenda/tool/framework. The culture of programming to me feels largely corrupt. Or maybe I'm just in a bad mood for the last few years.
Do you have some measurements to back this up? I could believe it's true, but you shouldn't say something is measurably worse and then not provide those measurements.
I don't think I've worked with a female developer peer either. Those women twenty-five years ago (I erred in saying it was only twenty) were senior to me. What's really scary is that we do have a few female developers on my team now . . . in Bangalore. Here in the US, we've actually fallen behind in terms of maintaining an environment that's appealing to developers who aren't young, (culturally) white, and male. That does not augur well for our future.
Wow, I thought I was critical, but there's some serious negativity going down here.
Maybe the article is a little scattered, but the tl;dr is Deirdre switched to programming for herself, and quit making crap other people want. For those reacting to the title without reading the article, she clarified that programming is awesome, but programming for money on other peoples terms sucks.
I don't know about you guys, maybe you're too young, but it resonates with me. Maybe I would have wasted fewer years programming for others earlier in my life if I'd known how bummed I'd get about it, or how excited I'd get about programming on my own terms.
I feel she was gloating more on what she did than why she quit, but I am in the same boat, I hate programming for others. I have a single client I work for that pays my bills and the rest of the time I build my own stuff. Sometimes the work for them is so mind numbingly boring and not interesting to me, that I could go a whole month only putting in 15 hours of work.
Were I gloating, I'd point out that I a) had code in space before I turned 18 (digital tape driver); b) had written (in Pascal) the code to control emissions for four power plants by the time I was 22.
Truth is, I feel like there aren't any more really interesting problems for me to solve. I've accomplished enough of each kind of thing that really engages me that I'm done.
I'd turned down an Apple job in the mid-80s and always regretted it, so once I spent 5+ years on the Safari team, I felt like that was the only checkbox left.
I have no idea how the middle section of this post is relevant to the rest of it. It just seems like the author needed to flesh out another rant or justify a choice no one questioned them on and decided to find any reason to diss the web. An error in the W3 validator is not really an 'error', especially considering the type of errors that are included in those 600 odd (Most of them are about missing spaces).
EDIT: Just seen the date on the article, likely the hundreds and hundreds of errors at the time are gone now, seeing as there's only like 50 showing now
Programming is nothing but transforming data from one form into another.
Once you reach a level of competency where like the author of this article you can implement any kind of transform you like then 99% of programming becomes rather boring.
Sure there are still the 1% of interesting problems and algorithms that are fun to work on, but you can only implement so many basic CRUD API's, and boilerplate business logic classes, and cut and paste website designs before you tire of that stuff.
After 30+ years of coding I'm sure the author of this article has implemented pretty much everything she has ever wanted to. It's natural that she would find implementing the same things over and over again for other people to be unrewarding, and instead desire to pursue the new challenge of designing an interesting new product of her own.
Yep, you've got it. Once I realized I had the skill to accomplish a workable version of anything is when I started noticing that there weren't many problems I cared enough about to feel like they were worth my time.
There are things I'm interested in implementing still. I still enjoy working in Ruby, and my Python's gotten rusty, but I actually work mostly in PHP these days (because of WordPress). I keep promising myself to learn Swift, but I lack Swift-type problems to solve that I care about.
The other thing, as one gets older and has a lot more experience: how much of your remaining unknown quantity of time are you willing to spend doing programming vs. some of your other life goals?
Wow, I'd expect people here to be more empathic towards a person having a career in software engineering longer than most of the lifetimes of the HN crowd (assuming the article is truthful).
Instead one gets a bunch of dismissive, I-know-better-then-all-of-you BS. And they say bankers are arrogant.
I got the "...back in my day, everything was all neat and tidy...now it's all gone to shit..." sort of feeling while reading this article. Websites have always been shit, and if you approach rendering/parsing/consuming web content programmatically and expect perfection...you're in for a frustrating experience.
I agree with the author that programming sucks pretty bad. Making it suck less is part of the joy I get when programming. Even the highest quality software is at best organized chaos. We all know how to approach problems, that's the boring part that no one really cares about. Diving in and discovering the unknown is where the fun begins. That's where we have the opportunity to optimize, refactor, learn new things, and perfect the art.
Maybe everyone reaches a point where they become jaded, but all of the things causing the author to quit are the exact things that make me want to continue.
Readit News
On the other hand, that doesn't explain everything. As the computing industry has become bigger and more lucrative, it has also become less like a gentleman's race and more like a cage fight. The primary mode of interaction has shifted from collaboration to competition. There are always more projects in any given space, creating more factions each more determined to sling FUD at each other so that their project and their investment in it stay relevant. There are more sub-sub-domains of knowledge, with those on the peaks of each sneering at the others. The environment for women has become measurably worse than it used to be; I worked with a higher percentage of women on Encore's kernel team twenty years ago than I do now even at Red Hat. It's a nasty, aggression-soaked environment, and anybody who doesn't believe that must not have read the other comments on this very page. I can tell you, it didn't used to be that way.
Programming as an activity has its ups and downs. Programming as a career has started to just plain suck.
Man does this resonate...for the last several years now I have recurring encounters of people in programming having no interest in doing or discovering what's Right, but rather only concerned about Winning petty arguments, pushing their agenda/tool/framework. The culture of programming to me feels largely corrupt. Or maybe I'm just in a bad mood for the last few years.
Do you have some measurements to back this up? I could believe it's true, but you shouldn't say something is measurably worse and then not provide those measurements.
I don't think most men in the industry can imagine what that would be like.
Maybe the article is a little scattered, but the tl;dr is Deirdre switched to programming for herself, and quit making crap other people want. For those reacting to the title without reading the article, she clarified that programming is awesome, but programming for money on other peoples terms sucks.
I don't know about you guys, maybe you're too young, but it resonates with me. Maybe I would have wasted fewer years programming for others earlier in my life if I'd known how bummed I'd get about it, or how excited I'd get about programming on my own terms.
Truth is, I feel like there aren't any more really interesting problems for me to solve. I've accomplished enough of each kind of thing that really engages me that I'm done.
I'd turned down an Apple job in the mid-80s and always regretted it, so once I spent 5+ years on the Safari team, I felt like that was the only checkbox left.
- "There a problem in software, no one is taking it seriously" - "There's no problem in software that I know of, why do you even care?"
EDIT: Just seen the date on the article, likely the hundreds and hundreds of errors at the time are gone now, seeing as there's only like 50 showing now
Writing code that must absolutely positively do the right thing ... with other people's unvalidated crap ... might just colour your views slightly.
Once you reach a level of competency where like the author of this article you can implement any kind of transform you like then 99% of programming becomes rather boring.
Sure there are still the 1% of interesting problems and algorithms that are fun to work on, but you can only implement so many basic CRUD API's, and boilerplate business logic classes, and cut and paste website designs before you tire of that stuff.
After 30+ years of coding I'm sure the author of this article has implemented pretty much everything she has ever wanted to. It's natural that she would find implementing the same things over and over again for other people to be unrewarding, and instead desire to pursue the new challenge of designing an interesting new product of her own.
There are things I'm interested in implementing still. I still enjoy working in Ruby, and my Python's gotten rusty, but I actually work mostly in PHP these days (because of WordPress). I keep promising myself to learn Swift, but I lack Swift-type problems to solve that I care about.
The other thing, as one gets older and has a lot more experience: how much of your remaining unknown quantity of time are you willing to spend doing programming vs. some of your other life goals?
They're not quitting, they're retiring. What a silly article.
The proper analogy would be: "So, after a lawyer retires s/he immediately stops practicing law?"
Yes, s/he does.
Did you read the article?
Instead one gets a bunch of dismissive, I-know-better-then-all-of-you BS. And they say bankers are arrogant.
Maybe everyone reaches a point where they become jaded, but all of the things causing the author to quit are the exact things that make me want to continue.